Podcast: Intel HPC Developer Conference Coming to Austin for SC15

In this podcast, Intel Software Evangelist James Reinders describes the upcoming Intel HPC Developer Conference. Featuring a keynote by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the event takes place Nov. 14-15 in Austin, just prior to SC15.

Transcript:

insideHPC: Thanks for coming on. I wanted to ask you today about the HPC developer conference that’s coming to Austin for SC15, and I understand you’ve been very active in planning this event.

James Reinders: Absolutely, it’s been my joy to work with a number of experts that’ll be doing presentations for the day and a half of our conference.

insideHPC: Great. To start at the beginning, this conference will take place just prior to SC15 on this Saturday and this Sunday. James, why do a HPC developer conference from Intel? Isn’t there enough going on in Austin?

James Reinders

James Reinders: Well, there’s certainly a lot going on, but you know if you get the chance to learn more, it’s never a bad thing. I think we’ve had the pleasure for a long time of hosting folks on Sunday. We’ve just expanded it to a day and a half and shifted the focus on what we’re hearing people are most interested in. Which is– how do you actually take advantage of the hardware? How do we actually involve our software often we give it a take on modernizing code?

insideHPC: Along those lines, you’ve got a number of keynote speakers-you’re one off course- but we have Jack Antgara is the first one on the list. What do you think Jack’s going to be talking about?

James Reinders: Well, I’m sure Jack will talk about his experiences with the same thing: how do you take the advantage of modern hardware? I don’t know exactly what the specific things Jack’ll say but am sure they’ll be interesting and focused on his experiences with his organization that are taking advantage of the wide array of hardware and parallelism in general.

insideHPC: And what about yourself, James? I’m sure you’re going to be along those themes but what specifically are you going to cover in your keynote talk?

James Reinders: Well, we’re going to be focused on setting the stage for all the different talks that will be going. How does one stitch together thinking about how to approach the challenge of using parallelism using modern hardware for the software that you have at hand and am hoping that the talks give a lot of practical aspects to that real world experiences. I, for one, will definitely be talking about my experiences, both working with customers and I’ve had the good fortune to work on two recent books, High Performance Parallelism Pearls. And we chose the word “pearls” in reference to something of high value. We’re very happy we relayed a lot of real-world application experiences through our two books the last couple of years, and I will relate some of anecdotes and advice based on that and then relate it to the day and a half of the conference we have.

insideHPC: When I initially was looking at this, I thought “Oh, it’s gonna be a one room kind of–” But no, this has multiple breakout rooms, a lot going on, and some pretty notable sets of topics as well.

James Reinders: Oh yeah, it’s exciting. I wish I could go see all of them live. There’ll be as many as five tracks running at the same- plus even when we have five tracks running there will be some other activities and a couple of additional rooms- but we are going to record- hopefully that works for us- so all the main sessions and make those available so people will have to pick which track to go to but you can sit down and watch some of the ones you missed later as well.

insideHPC: Will there be an exhibits area or sponsor area with tables?

James Reinders: Yeah we’ve got a few sponsors that will also be there in a room to talk to folks, we have an evening event to mingle and a bunch of– so we’ll have a lot of opportunities to interact with the attendees and the sponsors there.

insideHPC: So James I guess this is kind of a wrap up here, I’m looking at the topics; this don’t look like marketing talks to me. Is there going to be good technical meat for the attendees?

James Reinders: Absolutely. I’m being the tech chair and I’ve got some wonderful track chairs working with me, but as we review the topics, our constant advice to the speakers is: delete the slides, it looks too much like marketing, tell us about real world experiences, show us some code, talk about it, make sure there’s some discussion time. We’re very interested in making sure this is a developer to developer communications. All of the speakers are technical and have had real experiences with their codes, so engaging them should be real fun.

insideHPC: Last question; how much is this going to cost an attendee to come to the HPC Developer Conference?

James Reinders: We are not charging admission, surprisingly enough. I think this is a high-value conference, I don’t know if we’ll always do that in the future, but at least for this year we’re not charging anything. We’ll be supplying food and a wonderful set of talks. Yes, you’ll have to fly in – perhaps a little bit earlier and stay in Austin – but you’ll have a wonderful opportunity to interact with us, and we won’t charge a cover fee.

insideHPC: Well, terrific. In fact, I had to change my plans to attend, and I can confirm there are rooms available through the SC15 Housing Site, and they still have pretty good rates. So James, I want to thank you once again for telling us about this and coming on the show today.

James Reinders: I look forward to seeing you and everyone else in Austin.

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